Passage A

In 1940, Benjamin Lee Whorf seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think. In particular, Whorf announced, Hopi and English impose different pictures of reality on their speakers, impeding mutual understanding. Eventually, it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims.

Whorf’s main mistake was to assume that our mother tongue prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts; new research suggests that in reality its influence consists in what it obliges us to think about. German, for example, forces me to designate my neighbor as male (Nachbar) or female (Nachbarin).

Furthermore, grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations that speakers have toward objects around them. In the 1990s, psychologists compared associations that speakers of German and Spanish make. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks and violins. When speakers were asked about the characteristics of various objects, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks, and violins to have stereotypically masculine properties like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.

Passage B

Studies involving Pirahã and Mundurukú Indian subjects from the Brazilian Amazonia give evidence regarding the role of language in the development of numerical reasoning. The subjects in these reports apparently have consistent, unambiguous words for one and two and more loosely used words for three and four, but these subjects may not have true number words at all. Moreover, they do not overtly count, either with number words or by means of tallies. Yet, when tested on a variety of numerical tasks—naming the number of items in a stimulus set, constructing sets of equivalent number, judging which of two sets is more numerous, and mental addition and subtraction—the results appear to indicate that the subjects possess an innate imprecise nonverbal concept of number.

In showing that subjects with no verbal counting system have a concept of approximate numerical magnitude comparable to that of numerate subjects, these reports support a non-Whorfian, language-independent view of the origins of our concept of number. However, there is more to the story. Numerate subjects have a strong intuition of exact numerical equality. Two plus two is exactly four, not roughly four. When the innumerate subjects in these reports matched a set of four items to a set of five, or judged that 6–3=2, they gave evidence of being indifferent to exact numerical equality, an indifference not seen in numerate control subjects. Thus, the reports suggest that learning number words either creates a concept of exact numerical equality (a strong Whorfian hypothesis), or mediates the expansion of such a concept (a weaker Whorfian hypothesis), or directs attention to such a concept (a non-Whorfian hypothesis).